Ironically, my neck is sore from working on this neck. I've got my sculpture stand cranked up to the highest mark but with all this detail and oddly curved bits and pieces I'm craning my neck plenty to get them all worked out. Spent the day on just this one profile side of the vertebrae and got about halfway up the front side (you can see below just how rough the upper part of the front of the neck is). The other side of the neck is going to be trickier because the threaded rod of the armature isn't on center and so will be exposed. I'll have to carve the vertebrae around it, which will be bothersome... so I've decided to make that side the one I'll do the ecorche' on. Which means I'm not going to fuss so much with modeling every last detail of the vertebrae on that side since it'll all be covered with muscle anyway. But *this* side I want looking nice. I'll put up with whatever neck pain I need to in order to get it looking decent.

Reason #48 for why it's nice to live in a big city: It's no problem to skip down to your local anatomical models manufacturer and pick up a decent cervical spine model.

Yes, I bought a model and what a difference it makes! In the same time it took me to (very poorly) model just one vertebrae yesterday, I roughed out all seven today, including reworking the one I took a stab at yesterday. Still lots of adjusting and tweaking and refining to do on these, but it's coming along very quickly now --

And here's my new buddy, come to save the day (cue angelic choir):

I've become quite stuck. With no good life-size model of the cervical vertebral column to work with I'm having a hard time modeling this part. I brought in a bunch of printed images today but vertebrae are like the pelvic bone, so full of twists and turns, strange curves and protrusions that you really need a 3-dimensional model to truly understand it. Spent several hours today *just* on the atlas, the top-most vertebrae. ... ugh ... But I'll tell you this -- the first two vertebrae of the spinal column, the atlas and the axis, are really wonderful and amazing bones.

But given the challenge of sculpting such convoluted 3-dimensional forms from 2-D images, I'm debating now whether to spring for a (cheap) 3-D model of this part of the spine, or if I should just go ahead and create a very generalized (and probably incorrect in more ways than I want to consider) cervical column, remembering that my whole goal with this project is to learn the basic underlying structure of the head and neck. I don't need to model absolutely perfect vertebrae to get a good working knowledge of the musculature of the neck. But then, I love these sorts of challenges and take great delight in learning all the subtleties of form.

Just the start of the rough shapes of the cervical vertebrae. A little challenging since I don't have any good life-sized models. Even my anatomy books don't show these vertebrae very well. It's got me thinking now -- maybe Santa will bring me a decent full-sized skeleton for Christmas? 

All this technical work. It's good knowledge to have but is not what I want to do ultimately. I much prefer a sort of 'abstracted realism' approach at this point in my aesthetic sensibility. The other thing about doing technical "copy from sight" exercises is that they lack the kind of generative creativity I crave. Nachmanovitch writes, "Competance that loses a sense of its roots in the playful spirit becomes ensconced in rigid forms of professionalism." Precisely. So I did the following in the spirit of play. I'm calling it "Cheese Doodle In Clay" (no cheese was harmed in the making of this sculpt) --

When I have a terrible need of--shall I say the word--religion, then I go out and paint the stars.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

The changes may not be all that apparent in this photo, but this is 6 more hours of work from yesterday's photo. I spent most of the day on the jaw, around the nose and at the zygomatic arch. The instructional DVD (which I've completely abandoned now) had the viewer take measurements of their own skull at different key points. I had wondered how accurate those would be given the thickness of skin and muscle, but trusted the guy on the video. But today as I worked from the models it became apparent that my sculpture was larger than life-size. Not by much (maybe 1/2", give or take), but enough to cause some difficulty when working from the life-sized models. So I did a lot of scraping down to get it a little more in sync. It's still larger than the models, but not by much. I also raised the ear hole about half an inch and took off about an inch from below the occipital bone, behind the mastoid process (which you can't see in this photo), which may mean I have to rework the cervical vertebrae. We'll see.

Today I chucked the instructional DVD I've been working with and instead just referred to the skull models I have. The DVD has it's merits (led by a guy who does a lot of CGI) in that it was good for the first part of the sculpt, figuring out the general planes and proportions. But now that I'm getting down to the nitty gritty it's much better to be working with an actual model. I mostly reworked and refined the cranium today refining the generalized CGI-like planes for a more precise realism. I also retooled all of the facial features. It's a bit of a challenge as I have two skull models that are quite different (one male, one female, and I think some ethnic differences as well), plus I'm working off of my own skull's dimensions. So this is more "best guess" than an exact replica of either of the models I have.

A side view -- wish I'd taken some profile pics with the previous incarnations. Haven't touched the cervical vertebrae in a few days, so it's still in "blocked in" phase here: